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* * * * *

It was Ronald McDonald’s eyes that haunted me. 

I had been walking toward the entrance of one of the four McDonald’s franchises in Undisclosed when I glanced at the cartoon clown logo in the window and let out a scream.  Just a little scream, but I still frightened one little girl on the sidewalk so badly that she screamed, too.  One middle-aged man in a baseball cap who had been strolling toward the entrance behind me very discreetly turned on his heels and walked the other way.  I felt like a jackass. 

But I couldn’t help it.  I stood there on the sidewalk outside the restaurant for several minutes, gawking at the thing.  It was one of those clear plastic static signs, pressed to the inside of the glass with the cartoon image filling most of that pane.  The cloud of red hair, the size 60 red shoes, the yellow suit, and the, well... 

I reached out and brushed my fingers over the glass. 

The image is so perfectly drawn, I thought.  So vivid.

Other late-night customers brushed past me and cast quick, stealthy glances my way, looking at the crazy man with the beard stubble and the ruffled dark hair, wearing the faded charcoal jacket over a black button-up shirt with a row of crimson Chinese characters down the front (the outfit wasn’t as gay as it sounds).  Look at the nut, staring into the four foot-tall corporate logo like it holds the meaning of life.  Don’t get too close to him, honey. 

But they didn’t see what I saw, I was sure of that.  They weren’t looking or screaming or puking.  No, they saw the happy clown with his arms spread wide, one leg cocked at a 45-degree angle with one red floppy clown shoe tipped up into the air, big smile spread across his red and white face, welcoming paying customers into his burger factory.  I remembered it from the last 100 times I had been here. 

What I saw at the moment was a clown standing there with his gut split raggedly open, as if cut with a dull utility razor.  He was—how can I put this delicately?  In this perfectly-rendered and shaded cartoon he was using his own white-gloved hands to feed a rope of his own intestines into his mouth. 

Detailed.  Yes.  It was very, very detailed. 

But it was those eyes that got me.  His expressive cartoon eyes pulsed with a terror about to boil over into madness.  Tears streaked his face, sweat beaded his forehead.  Those eyes pleaded with me, looked right into me and screamed for mercy.  Begged to be put out of his misery.  Those eyes told a story I didn’t want to hear.  It was a perfect cartoon rendering, not just of a man eating himself, but of a man being forced to eat himself. 

And only I saw it.  The messed-up logo was not an act of vandalism, the work of some artistic vegan defacing the hated burger chain.  No manager rushed out to cover it.  This image existed only to my eyes.  This type of thing had been happening more and more. 

I closed my eyes, looked again.  Still there.  And yeah, it was there.  So totally and completely there, not shimmering like a mirage in the desert or some blur out the corner of your eye.  It just clung to the window in it’s brazen thereness, real right down to the little plastic corners peeling up from the glass. 

Look at his face, man.  The blood stained around his lips.  And what’s that caked around his cheeks?  Gotta be bits of- 

I turned away, tried to clear my head, to concentrate. 

But you still see it, don’t you?  Everything rendered in cheerful comic book pinks and reds, clean, black ink outlines, the knots of guts sagging out of his abdomen-  

I very quickly spun back at the image.  There.  For just a split second, I saw the normal logo, the way everybody else saw it.  Happy corporate clown.  Then it blurred back to the corrupted version again.

I stood there and craned my neck up to the starless night sky, suddenly aware of how cold the night air was, its chilled fingers rustling my hair and sneaking up the back of my shirt like some old refrigerated pervert.  Some would have stopped here to doubt their sanity, but by now the part of my mind that issued doubts about my sanity had burned out from overuse.

Here’s the thing.  With this perception we had, it was becoming obvious that as I started to notice them—whoever they were—they were also noticing me.  They knew I knew.  And I knew they were messing with me, doing it just to let me know they knew I knew. 

Recently, I had a whole week where every meal smelled like rotten eggs or formaldehyde or paint thinner.  Then they got bored with that and suddenly I started hearing odd things over the radio.  First, just curse words thrown into popular songs where clearly no one had ever written or recorded them, so quick I’d have to do a double-take to see if I had actually heard it.  Then, over these last two days I’m hearing entire songs changed, twisted.  I get dancey and light-hearted beats under lyrics about prison rape or incest and, once, a version of Stairway to Heaven with my name edited in throughout.  This new version that blared over the speakers of a busy shopping mall (though only I heard it, of course) was a list of all my chronic sins and vices, a musical rundown of all the reasons I, David Wong, was destined for Hell. 

They haunt minds.

It got to me, I admit.  Even if their version of Stairway barely rhymed. What rhymes with masturbation?  But I knew what anybody who’s ever dealt with any bully or prankster knows: showing that it’s getting to you is just gasoline on the fire. 

I turned from the gutted clown logo.  I stepped inside the restaurant and strode up to the counter, wanting a Quarter-Pounder but suddenly seeing an ad for Bratwursts (McDonald’s restaurants here in the Midwest offer bratwursts in the fall, they may not at yours so that’s your problem, not mine).  I grinned inwardly and, thinking of gutted Ronald, ordered two of the inch-thick sausages.

I had just sat down and started arranging my food when my cell phone rang.  Shocked, as always, that I had actually left it on, I fished around inside my jacket for the chirping thing.

The readout said it was John calling. I hunted for the button that would let me answer it and found it on the third try.

“Hey.  What’s up, John?”

“Is David there?”

John knew damned well this was my cell phone and that I was the only person who would ever, ever answer it.  He did this every time.

“It’s me, John.”

Long pause.

“Dad?”

I rolled my eyes.  I suddenly realized I was listening to a supernaturally-reworked version of an 80’s song by some Duran Duran soundalike band over the restaurant’s muzak.  It was the one with the word “Africa” in the chorus, and this version had been twisted into some kind of a racist diatribe against blacks.  I tried to block it out, turning my attention to the call.

Toto.  That was the band’s name.

“If you don’t get to the point right now, I’m hanging up,” I said. “I’m trying to eat here.”

“Just put David on the phone, please.”

“This is David and you know it.”

“Dave, it’s you.  Good.  Man, that guy you got answering your phone for you is a dick.  I just got a call from my uncle.  He’s asked us to come in on a case.  Like consultants.”

“Your Uncle?  The exotic dancer?  Exactly what kind of ‘consulting’ would we be doing?”

“No, no, Uncle Drake.  The cop.  They got weirdness and they want us to come look at it.  The crime scene is at 818 West 23rd Street.  By the mall.”

This stopped me.  There was that little circle of people who knew about the talent or curse or whatever you want to call it John and I had. It was a group that was widening far more quickly than I would have liked, rumors getting passed here and there during those drunken 3:00 AM conversations around campfires and internet message boards and on couches reeking of pot smoke.

But the idea of doing this in some kind of official capacity was almost embarrassing, like a guy with webbed toes being asked to work as a foot model for a catalog that marketed to the deformed.  Is this what I wanted to be known for?  And what cop would risk our names getting into the hands of the defense attorney or, even worse, the press?  This smelt of desperation.

“John, this could turn into a freakin’ circus.  I don’t know about this.”

John raised his voice.

“-No, Dave.  Your signal’s breaking up.  I didn’t say ‘circus.’  I said ‘crime scene.’  Look, just come and I’ll explain after you get here.  I think they found Molly.”

“What?  My dog Molly?”

I was talking to a dead phone.  I turned it off.

Molly had been missing for about a month.  That wasn’t strange, she left sometimes.  I didn’t keep her chained up or anything.  I kept food for her but it wasn’t like she was my prisoner.  I figured if she wanted to come back, she’d come back.  But the cops calling?  Had she stolen another car?

I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead.  The muzak sang its bigotry in perfect 80’s pop harmony.

Let’s send ‘em aaallllllll ba-ack to Aaaaafrica...

I gathered up my bratwurst and headed for my car.

* * * * *

I picked up John at his building, since it turned out his supernatural powers couldn’t stop the bank from repossessing his motorcycle six months ago.  We rode into town in silence, passing the Mall of the Dead.  That’s what we called the half-finished and subsequently-abandoned Undisclosed Shopping Centre, now with weeds growing in the parking lot.  The city sank $40 million worth of tax breaks and infrastructure into getting the thing built before three of the five investors disappeared (I always imagined that all three simultaneously shot each other, like in the movie Reservoir Dogs).  Now, three years and thirty lawsuits later, raccoons nested in the 150 empty store slots and rainwater puddled in the halls.  One more eyesore, one more civic embarrassment for Undisclosed.  Anyway. 

We turned onto 23rd Street, a lineup of perfect new houses with trendy coffee cream-colored siding and a shiny SUV in every drive.  I immediately could see the nest of swirling red and blue lights four blocks away, looking like the ship from Close Encounters had landed there. 

“Damn,” John said, flicking his cigarette butt out the window.  “I didn’t know this town had that many cops.”

Indeed.  The sausages had turned to ground-up bricks in my stomach. 

We pulled off into a yard two blocks away from the commotion.  I sure as hell wasn’t gonna pull up there with the professionals, among the swirling lights and the real cops, pretending to be one of them. 

One guy tells us to turn back, and we go.  No matter who it is.  Anybody says “boo” and we turn around and never come back here. 

It was a brand new two-story house, with an attached garage.  I followed John as he strode across the yard, lighting a new cigarette as he went.  He timed that, I thought.  Got rid of the old butt in the car so he could light up a new one as he strode onto the scene.  He did it because he knew it would look cool. 

I got close enough to the open garage to see a cobalt blue Jeep parked inside, license plate STRMQQ 1.  John looked at it and frowned a little.  Four cops stood out on the front lawn, looking too alert, looking scared, looking like they all needed each other’s armed company right now.  Eight eyes landed on us. 

“Don’t worry,”  John said to them.  “We’re here.”

Each cop was individually pissed off by that, I could see, and it was only the arrival of John’s Uncle Drake that spared us the confrontation with these guys who clearly had no idea who we were.  Drake was a big guy with a uniform that stretched and bulged around the middle.  He sported an uneven mustache that I think he grew to cover a scar on his upper lip.  He had pried himself out of a nearby squad car.  He shook John’s hand. 

“Hey, Johnny.  I really appreciate you comin’ by like this.”

“So what’s goin’ on?”

“Welllll, it started with a call from the neighbors about two hours ago, so we sent a car and, well, that’s where the story gets long.  Do you, uh, know whose house this is?”

“Strom Cuzewon?”  offered John. 

We stood in silence for a moment. 

“Um, no.  It’s Ken Phillipe, the channel five weather guy.”

“Oh,” said John, seeming unsatisfied.  I glanced back at the plates, STRMQQ 1. 

“The Q’s are supposed to look like a pair of eyes,” I informed John.  “The license plate means ‘Storm Watcher.’”

John looked at the plates, then back at me, then at the plates again.  I noticed for the first time that the big bay window into the living room of the house had been bashed in, the curtains behind it rustling in the breeze.  Finally John said, “So somebody killed the weather guy?”

Drake grunted.  “Sorta.  Damndest thing you ever saw.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“We ain’t been inside the house yet.  There’s this, dog.  John here said he thought it was yours.”

I walked up to the front door and peered into the decorative little window, looking into the living room.  A girl sat on an overstuffed leather couch, maybe a few years younger than me, silken auburn hair pulled into a ponytail.  Little wisps of bangs drifted down over her smooth forehead, just above her gorgeous almond eyes.  She wore cutoff sweatpant shorts and had the most perfect pair of tanned thighs I have ever seen.  I felt my hand instinctively go up to straighten my hair and I was suddenly horribly aware of every physical flaw on my body.  Every ounce of fat, the little scar on my cheek. 

If I looked like that, I would wear shorts in October, too.  I’d quit my job and spend all day at home, gently caressing myself.  Did I shave today?

On the floor next to the couch was a bloody dead person. 

“That’s the weather guy?” I asked. 

“Yeah,” confirmed Drake. 

“Do you see the girl sitting on the couch?”

“Look, buddy, I told ya we’ve tried to get to her in there, but the dog-“

“-I wasn’t being sarcastic.  I just wanted to know if you could see her.”

“That’s Krissy Lovelace, their neighbor.  She’s been sitting like that since we got here, frozen.  We even tried to signal to her but she won’t respond.  Like she’s just blanked out.”

“So she killed him?”

“No, his throat was torn out.  By the dog.  It’s still in there.  That’s the problem.  Every time we try to get in it-”

“-Damn,” I interrupted.  “It’s too bad this city doesn’t have a special department to, you know, control animals.  Oh, wait.  We do.  It’s called Animal Control.  Do you want their number?”

“Wait a second,” said John.  “You’re saying Molly did that?”  He turned to me.  “Dave, we sat there and poked at Molly with a stick for exactly twenty-three minutes that one time before she even growled.  She couldn’t do that to a man.“

“The dog in there, it ain’t like that,” Drake said.  “This dog ain’t like that at all.  My guys won’t even go in and I don’t blame ‘em.  It’s somethin’... unnatural.”

“Have you thought maybe it’s rabies?”  I asked.  “Or do you always presume witchcraft first?”

Drake leveled a very cold and tired gaze at me.  “Mister, it ain’t like that.  It ain’t like that at all.”

I peered in again.  “Well, I don’t see a dog.  And I’m not seeing why we can’t just-”

Suddenly Molly came into view.  It was her all right, the rusty coat of an Irish retriever or whatever she was, now shampooed and combed to perfection.  Her new owner apparently groomed her more than I had and I thought that,  together, the girl and dog could make a good living as models in the dog supply industry.

The only other thing that was different about Molly was the blood staining her muzzle and the fact that she was floating three feet off the floor. 

Molly’s legs were stiff below her as she moved, buzzing slowly across the room as if on a track and hung by invisible threads.  When Molly came near the door she turned her head my way and in a clear but guttural voice said, “I serve none but Korrok.”

Molly continued to float around the room like a shaggy little blimp.  I turned from the door.  John looked in after me. 

He thought for a moment, then nodded as if the pieces were falling into place.  Finally he turned to me and said, “Strum Two-Cues.  That’s what it means.  S-T-R-M-Q-Q.  The guy was probably a pool player and used two cues at once, played them like fine musical instruments to the point that he could be said to be ‘strumming’ them.  ‘I plays a mean game of pool,’ they say down at the pool hall.  ‘But I knows better than to steps up to the table with old Strummy Two-Cues.  Weather by day, billiards by night.”

Drake had a good, long stare at John and then said, “Neighbor told us she was just walking the dog along the street out there and all the sudden the thing takes off.  The damned thing breaks its leash and races across the lawn like it was fired from a cannon.  It then jumps through the plate glass window.  From the looks of it the thing found the victim, jumped into the air and tore out his throat before he had a chance to even react.  Neighbor said Ms.  Lovelace ran inside after it.”

“Okay,” John said, turning to walk toward my car.

As usual, I knew what John had in mind.  He came back from the Hyundai with a little roll of candies I kept in the glove box.  I shook one out into my palm and stepped up to the door. 

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.